The cheapest deal comes courtesy of Vodafone, with the handset available for free - complete with 300 minutes, unlimited texts and 250MB data - for £22.50 per month. For those after more data, this can be bumped to 500MB per month by coughing up £9.99 for the Xperia T3.

Carphone Warehouse has yet to announce whether it will offer the handset on pay as you go, and the phone is yet to be offered elsewhere SIM-free.

The Sony Xperia T3 was announced in June as an affordable alternative to the flagship Xperia Z2. The handset has a 5.3in HD 720p screen powered by a quad-core 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 1GB of RAM and Google's Android 4.4 Kitkat mobile operating system.

The Xperia T3 measures in at just 7mm thick too and tips the scales at 148g, but it doesn't boast the same IP58 certification as its predecessor.